There are many examples of radio communication systems in which data is communicated by encoding the data to improve the likelihood of recovering the data at a receiver. As those acquainted with error correction encoding will appreciate, error correction encoding and decoding to recover payload data being communicated can perform better when the encoded data is interleaved so as to disperse the effect of any bursts of errors in the data symbols, so that the errors are separated as far as possible in the received symbol stream.
For example some systems use Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) to transmit the data. For example Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standards, use OFDM, which is also being proposed for the Advanced Television System Communications (ATSC) standard of 3rd generation (ATSC3.0). OFDM can generally be described as providing K narrowband sub-carriers (where K is an integer) which are modulated in parallel, each sub-carrier communicating a modulated data symbol, such as a Quadrature Amplitude Modulated (QAM) symbol or a Quaternary Phase-shift Keying (QPSK) symbol. The modulation of the sub-carriers is formed in the frequency domain and transformed into the time domain for transmission. Since the data symbols are communicated in parallel on the sub-carriers, the same modulated symbols may be communicated on each sub-carrier for an extended period, which can be longer than the coherence time of the radio channel. The sub-carriers are modulated in parallel contemporaneously, so that in combination the modulated carriers form an OFDM symbol. The OFDM symbol therefore comprises a plurality of sub-carriers, each of which has been modulated contemporaneously with different modulation symbols. During transmission, a guard interval filled by a cyclic prefix of the OFDM symbol precedes each OFDM symbol. When present, the guard interval is dimensioned to absorb any echoes of the transmitted signal that may arise from multipath propagation or other transmitters transmitting the same signal from a different geographic location. However one characteristic of OFDM is that errors in the received data stream can occur in bursts and so some form of interleaving is appropriate as mentioned above. The interleaving can be performed at the symbol level in which data symbols which are to be mapped onto the sub-carriers of the OFDM symbols are interleaved before being modulated onto the sub-carriers. The interleaving can also be performed at the bit level in which the bits of data before mapping onto the symbols for modulating the sub-carriers are interleaved/deinterleaved. Usually, communication systems include interleaving both at bit and symbol levels.
The simplest form of interleaving is block interleaving, in which data is written into memory row-wise and read-out column-wise or vice versa. The depth of such an interleaver can roughly be defined as the number of codewords that can be interleaved together. The effectiveness of an interleaver depends on its depth. Therefore, with large code words and a requirement for a large depth, the interleaver can demand a significant amount of memory, which can increase the cost of implementing receivers for interleaved data, which require a corresponding block deinterleaver. For this reason convolutional interleaving has been proposed, which as will be explained requires typically about half of the memory size of a block interleaver for the same interleaving depth. However for systems, such as television broadcast systems, in which data is transmitted in frames, convolutional interleavering can present some technical challenges.